The vast commotion of solitudes has a gamut; a formidable crescendo: the blow, the gust, the squall, the storm, the wild hurricane, the tempest, the waterspout; the seven chords of the lyre of the winds, the seven notes of the abyss. The sky is a breadth, the sea is a roundness; a breath passes, nothing remains of all this; all is fury and confusion.

Such are these forbidding places.

The winds rush, fly, swoop down, finish, begin again, soar, hiss, roar, laugh; frantic, wanton, unbridled, taking their ease on the irascible wave. These howlings have a harmony. They make the whole sky sonorous. They blow into the cloud as into a trumpet; they put their mouths to space, and they sing in the infinite with all the mingled voices of clarions, conch-shells, bugles, and trumpets, a sort of Promethean flourish. He who hears them is listening to Pan. The frightful thing about it is what they play. They have a colossal joy composed of shadow. They have a battue of vessels in the solitudes, without truce, day and night, at all seasons, at the tropics, as at the poles, sounding their distracting trumpet, they follow through the thickets of the clouds and the waves, the great black hunt of shipwrecks. They are the masters of the hounds. They amuse themselves. They make the waves, their dogs, bark at the rocks. They gather and disperse the clouds. They knead the suppleness of the immense water, as with millions of hands.

The water is supple because it is incompressible. It glides away from under the effort. Borne down on one side, it escapes on the other. It is thus that the water becomes a wave. The wave is its liberty.